Monthly Archives: October 2012

Sony, once the king of electronics which recently announced that it would lay off 2,000 employees by the end of this year, has unveiled the VAIO tablet PC with a 20-inch screen, weighing in at a bone breaking 11 pounds. The “mobile desktop” to use the term lightly employs Windows 8, although the fact that it contains only two hours of battery power puts an extreme limit on its portability.

Advertised as a computer for the whole family to use, the base model is priced at almost $900 which is big money when compared to smaller tablets like Apple’s$399 iPad 2 (and soon to be $399 iPad 3) along with the yet to be proven Microsoft’s$499 Surface Tablet.

Sony isn’t using the VAIO tablet to compete in the crowded tablet market; they’re trying to create a new market. This unconventional move also lies in stark contrast to Google’s slender, 10-inch tablet to be announced at its Android event later this month.

At such a high price and weak in functionality, it seems unlikely that Sony will be able to market the monstrous tabletop PC as a legitimate alternative to a desktop system. At a certain point, bigger just isn’t better, its just bigger. Sony should gave made the tablet a shade of green and used the moniker “Green Giant”.

Is the Droid Robot winning? As it turns out, a look at the latest results from an online poll reveals that Google’s Android OS may be becoming quite a problem for Apple’s iOS. While the majority of adults deemed both the Google Android platform and Apple iOS as very popular this October, Android maintained a small lead with 53.0% voting it as “hot” compared to Apple’s 47%.

These numbers become very interesting when viewed upon by generation using the chart below.

The Bottom Line: While both platforms are incredibly popular, it seems that the children of our future – Millenials and Gen X-ers – are starting to view Google Android as the mobile future platform, at least for the time being or until someone else builds a better mousetrap.

Just today I decided to post a few links to Reddit as an experiment, primarily to see if they generated immediate traffic, even the slightest to the linked page. Well, they did (somewhat) but what they also provided was further proof that a vast majority of those trolling Internet sites such as Reddit are idiots, for lack of a better word. Additionally, it provided evidence that idiots are immediately embraced by their fellow idiots.

The Reddit post in question was a link to a theory I wrote on TeeTwits of the adverse impact someone with great influence, in this case Lady Gaga could have on a stock such as Apple if she one day decided that Apple was evil and not cool for her fan base. http://www.teetwits.com/viewupdate.php?id=313

The reply to the above link from a respected user on Reddit was: “When Lady Gaga wore a dress made of meat, people still ate meat the next day”.

To this I had to say; “Obviously you have no idea nor the intelligence to effectively and correctly comprehend my thesis”.

Moral of the story? Never respond to or get concerned regarding comments to your posts wherever they may be. You know what they say, “On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog”.

Did you ever wonder why Google’s home page is so basic? In fact, it initially was simpler yet and didn’t include a “submit” button to initiate the search! To search, after adding text into the search box, the user would need to strike the enter key. I was almost ready to call Ripley on that until I verified it.

Though some have attributed Google’s design to simplicity, Google’s layout, which has changed very little since the beginning, owes its plain white design attribute to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his non-existent knowledge of HTML, the language for websites used to assemble text and other elements to create webpages. That’s right, this guy could build a complex search engine from scratch however didn’t posses the technical ability to include a submit button.

It was unlike many websites of the the time that were flashy, colorful, contained movement and asked you to click things. People simply couldn’t figure out how to use the search engine because Google was too simple. In a user study, Stanford University students asked to search for something on Google would sit for a minute or so staring at their screen, not quite sure what to click or how to search. Yes, this is fact.

A professor would then ask them, ‘What are you waiting for?’. “They’d say, “We’re waiting for the rest of it to load”. The blank homepage was so out of context and unusual, they were just waiting for the rest of it or for something to happen.

Google finally found a way to alert users that the page was ready and finished loading by a simple solution….. Placing a copyright notice at the bottom of the Google homepage that serves no other purpose than to signal the “all clear” and ready to search.

Today, Google’s website receives well over a billion unique viewers on a monthly basis and is the most valuable web property. It gets so much traffic that its estimated if an ad were allowed to run on the Google home page, the cost of the ad would exceed $10 million “per day”.

A New York State court has ruled the sales tax man can get his share of lap dances at men’s clubs.

In a 4-3 decision, the court rejected an Albany-area strip joint’s claim that it should be considered exempt from sales tax because its X-rated shows constitute a “dramatic or musical arts performance.”

The decision means the men’s club, “Night Moves” will have to pay more than $400,000 to settle its long-standing dispute with the state Tax Department. So in other words, a $20 lap dance now costs $21.60! LOL!

Does the government really have any business playing art critic? I don’t think so. The State of New York has no business differentiating between the Ballet and what form of dancing is done elsewhere.

On another note, if the state politicians avoided this club, most likely its projected tax bill would have been considerably less!

Enjoy the government invading your lifestyle and pocketbooks and expect it to intensify in the years ahead.

On average we’ll buy four fewer new cars by the time each of us hits 75 years old, the age when automobile industry experts believe most people are done buying new vehicles. “The boom days when you bought a vehicle for 4 or 5 years are likely over,” says auto industry analysts.

We’ve talked for some time about Americans holding on to their new cars longer and the reasons have been well documented. Cars simply last longer and as their prices have gone up, people are less willing to take on a monthly payment. Since the recession they have stretched out the length of time to pay off a new loan. In other words, people now expect to be in their car 6, 7, or 8 years (or more) after they buy it.

Although I rarely discuss the actual buying and selling of an individual stock or commodity publicly or with anyone other than the few firms I trade for, I can say this….I have been advising to avoid all equities that rely upon rising crude oil prices for growth. Although crude oil might not “tank”, I just can’t see any form of price appreciation in the near future.

About 60% of virus writers actually work under a contract for an organization looking to spread a virus.

It’s impossible for your computer to be infected by a virus, just from opening an email message.

Close to 60% of the radiation that comes from a mobile phone goes directly to the users head.

The web, not indexed by search engines is said to be 400 times bigger than the current size of the indexed web.

The original URL for Yahoo! was was http://akebono.stanford.edu/

The name of the search engine Alta Vista came into existence when the word Vista was misinterpreted as “Alta Vista” on a white board and Alta Vista was once a dominant search engine

Up until the 14th of September, 1995, website domain registration was free!

The average person receives around 30 – 50 emails a day with 10% of these being Spam.

Billions of hours are wasted online, spent, waiting for content to download.

The first functional “modern” computer was built in 1941 by Konrad Zuse in World War 2. He needed additional funding from the Germans but was denied because they did not expect the war to last beyond Christmas.